‘Story sculptures’ at local art center

Layl McDill visited the Waseca Art Center Thursday March 30 for the opening reception of her gallery show there. The show continues until May 5. The artwork on display is available for sale with pickup at the end of the gallery show period. “I'm so grateful to get to show in an art center like this,” McDill said of Waseca's facility, which she saw for the first time when she came to hang the pieces for her show. McDill displays her art throughout the country, and calls Minnesota “a Mecca of Art Centers” for its plentiful and high quality arts facilities.

McDill's primary medium is polymer clay, which she combines with wire, beads, and miscellaneous found objects to create her “story sculptures of mystery and wonderment.” The sculptures boast a high level of detail, with their clay components being made from many smaller pieces blended together. “You could spend hours just looking at it all,” said one young observer at Thursday's reception.

 McDill described two different methods she uses to create these impossibly small pieces, each of which bears its own imagery. Some are drawn in advance, McDill explained. “I love to sketch, everywhere I go,” she said as she pointed to one image which she says she sketched while visiting the Louvre. These sketches are then transferred to clay using a laser paper technique. The second technique McDill uses is called “millefiori,” and involves building much larger versions of the images directly into clay, then stretching and rolling them into elongated canes, many as small as a half-inch across, that are then sliced into the pieces used to assemble her larger works. McDill says she discovered millefiori in a children's art book, where it was pictured as an example of big and small, and has learned to replicate the technique largely through trial and error. “And I'm still learning,” she added, describing some of the unpredictable ways her highly intricate millefiori canes behave. “Even though I do it all the time, It's still like – how did that happen?”

McDill has small town roots, having grown up in Gillette, WY where she participated in 4-H and says it all got started. She has been making art since she was just a toddler, however, and says her earliest memory is of rolling homemade playdough in her hands. McDill attended the Columbus College of Art and Design in Columbus, OH after starting out at a community college with the initial intent to illustrate children's books. Around the same time as her graduation from art school, McDill says she did a gallery show like the one currently displayed in Waseca and thought, “I can make whatever I want, and people will buy it?” which led to her developing her current artistic endeavors.

McDill says she started producing her art using a lot more mixed media, and turned to clay for its portability when she had children. Now that they've grown and she has a larger studio to work with, that mixed media is becoming more prominent in her artwork again. “I think that's a direction I'm going,” she said with a laugh. McDill says she loves stories, and connects many of her sculptures to them.  “Stories are how we communicate, they make you think and imagine,” McDill said. McDill also does “story slams,” or performative storytelling, in addition to her visual arts. One piece on display is connected to stories very overtly as McDill asks viewers to write down the stories they see, either to keep or to leave behind with the artwork. This is not the only opportunity viewers of McDill's gallery in Waseca have to interact with the artwork in various ways.

Currently McDill lives and works in Minneapolis, where she keeps a studio at 2505 Howard St. NE, studio A. She can also be found at LaylMcDill.com and ClaySquared.com as well as on TikTok at @laylmcdill.